Summer Says
Doris Ferleger
Pay attention to
your heat, your survival—
the tree rooted in your garden
is a sequined vernacular, a cashmere sweater.
Because nothing matters in the end
but comfort and the bending light.
Summer says, I will be the room you die in.
You will dream, neither of regret,
nor in the language you were born into.
A stranger will comb your existential threads.
You had thought, for instance, humans
were gerunds or harps bent
on playing in a diner that serves
black coffee and hard donuts.
You ask, What is the past?
What is it all for?
Summer says, The wound of being
untaught. Says, hungry.
Says, the cypress is a hospice,
says, falter, falter, falter,
bloom bloom bloom—too soon
a pall will keep you company.
Doris Ferleger is a winner of the New Letters Poetry Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. She is the author of three full volumes of poetry: Big Silences in a Year of Rain (finalist for the Alice James Books/Beatrice Hawley Award), As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, as well as a chapbook entitled When You Become Snow. Her work has been published in numerous journals including The Cape Rock, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DASH Literary Journal, Delmarva Review, El Portal, Euphony, Evening Street Review, Glint Literary Journal, Good Works Review, L.A. Review, Meadow, Off the Coast, Poet Lore, Rougarou, The Virginia Normal, Whimperbang, Whistling Shade, and South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA.